Faltering Thinking Quotes

Faltering thinking and indecisive conduct often result in losing ground and yielding to bleak caginess that generates the redoubtable Buridan's syndrome. As Buridan's ass is placed equally between a stack of hay and a pail of water, it dies of both hunger and thirst. ("The door was still ajar") ~ Erik Pevernagie

It's not my fault that there is this gap between rich and poor, it is the fault of governments. I want a different world. One where I don't wake up thinking I'm so lucky to be able to feed my daughter. ~ Emma Thompson

I'm open to whatever. I think sometimes when people collaborate these days, it's a little bit convenient. ~ Gotye

Clearly, one does not have to give up being an academic, retreat from rigorous research, or renounce the importance of specialization in order to address major social issues. I don't think you give up theoretical rigor by writing in a way that addresses major social concerns and is at the same time accessible to wider informed general audiences. ~ Henry Giroux

I'm not gay, a lotta people think I'm gay. I have a girlfriend. She thinks I'm gay. ~ Tom DeLonge

Even though we know sexual assault is still dramatically underreported, I think women are much more empowered today than they used to be. ~ Claire McCaskill

Acting is really instinctual and I think you can overanalyse what you're doing. A lot of it has to be based on instinct. ~ Daniel Radcliffe

I know that if I had a television in my flat I would convince myself that everything on it was really interesting. I would say, 'I'm a Celebrity - Get Me Out of Here!' is so sociologically fascinating that I think I'd better watch. ~ Brian Eno

I wondered what it does to each of us to spend the majority of our waking hours doings things we'd rather not do, wishing we were outside or simply elsewhere, wishing we were reading, thinking, making love, fishing, sleeping, or simply having time to figure out who the hell we are and what the hell we're doing. ~ Derrick Jensen

Perhaps I don't know enough yet to find the right words for it, but I think I can describe it. It happened again just a moment ago. I don't know how to put it except by saying that I see things in two different ways-everything, ideas included. If I make an effort to find any difference in them, each of them is the same today as it was yesterday, but as soon as I shut my eyes they're suddenly transformed, in a different light. Perhaps I went wrong about the imaginary numbers. If I get to them by going straight along inside mathematics, so to speak, they seem quite natural. It's only if I look at them directly, in all their strangeness, that they seem impossible. But of course I may be all wrong about this, I know too little about it. But I wasn't wrong about Basini. I wasn't wrong when I couldn't turn my ear away from the faint trickling sound in the high wall or my eye from the silent, swirling dust going up in the beam of light from a lamp. No, I wasn't wrong when I talked about things having a second, secret life that nobody takes any notice of! I-I don't mean it literally-it's not that things are alive, it's not that Basini seemed to have two faces-it was more as if I had a sort of second sight and saw all this not with the eyes of reason. Just as I can feel an idea coming to life in my mind, in the same way I feel something alive in me when I look at things and stop thinking. There's something dark in me, deep under all my thoughts, something I can't measure out with thou ~ Robert Musil

Avoid the crowd. Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece. ~ Ralph Charell

Over time I've learned, surprisingly, that it's tremendously hard to get teams to be super ambitious. It turns out most people haven't been educated in this kind of moonshot thinking. They tend to assume that things are impossible, rather than starting from real-world physics and figuring out what's actually possible. It's why we've put so much energy into hiring independent thinkers at Google, and setting big goals. Because if you hire the right people and have big enough dreams, you'll usually get there. And even if you fail, you'll probably learn something important. It's also true that many companies get comfortable doing what they have always done, with a few incremental changes. This kind of incrementalism leads to irrelevance over time, especially in technology, because change tends to be revolutionary not evolutionary. So you need to force yourself to place big bets on the future. ~ Eric Schmidt

Making a garden is somehow like conducting a symphony - different plants come forward at different times and you need to think very carefully about their placement in relation to each other. ~ Elisabeth Murdoch

To spend time observing, without drawing, thinking, without drawing, or feeling, without drawing, is the misfortune of nonartists. ~ Nick Meglin

Did ya ever think that we would pay the price for being lazy? ~ Ray Davies

I think that selling rights is a bad move commercially, not just morally. It cheapens the songs. When people come to my concerts, they often hold up candles when we do "Let It Be." I don't think they'd do that anymore if the song suddenly became part of an Oldsmobile ad. ~ Paul McCartney

People will continue to make movies. But I do think the economic model of the studio movie is closing in on a kind of systemic collapse. ~ Matthew Specktor

I want to believe we can be different, but when I look around the church, at the women comparing the length of their braids, reveling in another woman's punishment, scheming and clawing for every inch of position, I can't help thinking the men might be right. Maybe we're incapable of more. Maybe without the confines placed upon us, we'd rip each other to shreds, like a pack of outskirt dogs. ~ Kim Liggett

For a long time, I was afraid to be alone. I had to learn how to be alone. And there are still times when I think, Uh-oh! I gotta talk to somebody here or I'm gonna go crazy! But I like to be alone. Now I do. I really do. There's a big luxury in solitude. ~ Jack Nicholson

Gods and goddesses are not what people think they are. Their names are terms with which we try to convey a certain experience, a state of consciousness. ~ Frederick Lenz

I have had a fairly long life, above all a very happy one, and I think that I shall be remembered with some regrets and perhaps leave some reputation behind me. What more could I ask? The events in which I am involved will probably save me from the troubles of old age. I shall die in full possession of my faculties, and that is another advantage that I should count among those that I have enjoyed. If I have any distressing thoughts, it is of not having done more for my family; to be unable to give either to them or to you any token of my affection and my gratitude is to be poor indeed. ~ Antoine Lavoisier

Grieving is like being set afire. Except when you try to put out the flames they disappear; when you try to salve your wounds you find your skin unblemished. You take a breath, thinking the worst has passed, and then grief bursts into flame anew. It rages, it roars, it smolders, all at its own unfathomable whim. You can't shake it; you have no choice but to burn. ~ Marshall Thornton

anything in a marriage it is when to give up. I used to think that all marriages ran the same trajectory. They start with wanting to climb inside the other person and wear her skin as your own. They end with thinking that if the person across from you says another word, you will put a fork in her neck. ~ Thomas Christopher Greene

I think the challenge is, in fashion everybody wants to get rich and famous and it's easy to get rich and famous by being a bad person. But the challenge is to achieve your goals-whatever they are-while staying a decent human being. That's where it came from. ~ Katharine Hamnett

Even today, some opt for the comforts of mystification, preferring to believe that the wonders of the ancient world were built by Atlanteans, gods, or space travelers, instead of by thousands toiling in the sun. Such thinking robs our forerunners of their due, and us of their experience. Because then one can believe whatever one likes about the past - without having to confront the bones, potsherds, and inscriptions which tell us that people all over the world, time and again, have made similar advances and mistakes. ~ Ronald Wright

Taking us by and large, we're a queer lot
We women who write poetry. And when you think
How few of us there've been, it's queerer still.
I wonder what it is that makes us do it,
Singles us out to scribble down, man-wise,
The fragments of ourselves. Why are we
Already mother-creatures, double-bearing,
With matrices in body and in brain?
I rather think that there is just the reason
We are so sparse a kind of human being;
The strength of forty thousand Atlases
Is needed for our every-day concerns.
There's Sapho, now I wonder what was Sapho.
I know a single slender thing about her:
That, loving, she was like a burning birch-tree
All tall and glittering fire, and that she wrote
Like the same fire caught up to Heaven and held there,
A frozen blaze before it broke and fell.
Ah, me! I wish I could have talked to Sapho,
Surprised her reticences by flinging mine
Into the wind. This tossing off of garments
Which cloud the soul is none too easy doing
With us to-day. But still I think with Sapho
One might accomplish it, were she in the mood
to bare her loveliness of words and tell
The reasons, as she possibly conceived them
of why they are so lovely. Just to know
How she came at them, just watch
The crisp sea sunshine playing on her hair,
And listen, thinking all the while 'twas she
Who spoke and that we two were sisters
Of a strange, i ~ Amy Lowell

The poet or the story-teller who cannot give the reader a little ghostly pleasure at times never can be either a really great writer or a great thinker. ~ Lafcadio Hearn

My daughter wants to throw a stone at a bad man. I stop her from throwing, shaking my head and giving her a little slap. My disapproval is complete. You think: 'That's right, she shouldn't throw a stone even at a villain.' Then I hand her a brick to throw. ~ W.C. Fields

Imagine if the headless horseman had a headless horse. That would be chaos. I would think that if you were the headless horseman's horse, you would be very confused. "I don't think this dude can see." ~ Mitch Hedberg

We keep thinking there are only these two choices: We either grow apart or grow together. But maybe we can just kind of each grow on our own, and see how it goes. And then later, if it's right, we'll come back to each other and start again. ~ Jennifer E. Smith

A genius separates himself from things which are not useful nor beneficial. While you are eager to try new technologies - A genius is thinking about how to invent something totally different that will be used by all. ~ Mwanandeke Kindembo

Once you start thinking about where your products come from and what they 'do,' that's going to be an inherent part of your choice as you purchase products throughout your life. ~ Ellen Gustafson

I think Joe Leiberman has been one of the leaders of the country ... people have such a broad respect for him as a moral force. ~ Alan Lightman

The right-wing Tories and the conservative Whigs fought Napoleon as the Usurper and the Enemy of the Established Order; the liberal Tories and the radical Whigs fought him as the Betrayer of the Revolution and the Enslaver of Europe; they were all agreed in fighting him, and his notion that their disagreement signified national disunion was mere wishful thinking. All dictators since his time have fallen into the same trap: themselves blind to the values of liberty, they cannot conceive that people who disagree on its meaning can nevertheless unite in upholding their freedoms against patent despotism. ~ J. Christopher Herold

People are frightened of death, and the central lie of all religion is that there's a cure for this and an exception we've made in your own case: an eternal life offered if you make the right propitiations and the right abjections. Well, I'm sorry. I think that it's the height of immorality to lie to people like that. That's why [religion] survives. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Everyone else has sort of scattered off to their respective corners. I suppose everyone's doing some thinking, maybe saying some prayers. Hopefully Thomas and Carmel are making out in a closet. ~ Kendare Blake

You think about every piece of idiomatic speech adopted by white men over the past ten or twenty years; virtually all of it comes from hip-hop. ~ Jess Row

The present urgency is to begin thinking within the context of the whole planet, the integral earth community with all its human and other-than-human components. ~ Thomas Berry

If a rooster crows while you're thinking about a man," the fortuneteller had once told Maria, "then he's the one you'll marry. ~ Karen Cecil Smith

I try to play characters who are different from myself, so I feel like this character is someone who is really different. I actually think that if I did what he did in this movie, I would get a restraining order put against me. ~ Ryan Gosling

Do you think God would heal an adulterer? Well I believe if God would save an adulterer, then He would heal one. ~ Andrew Wommack

I think cursing is a bunch of malarkey. ~ Brian Wilson

Oh the Saint I would be if never I have erred.

It is easy to see the faults in another,
While forgetting ever that we have also stumbled. ~ Gillian Duce